The Conversation, Live.
You can listen to the signal. You can read the signal.
...or you can put it on your stage and feel it in the room.
Let me be upfront about something: I am not a musician. I can't sing, and trust me, nobody wants to see me dance. But I know exactly what I am — a natural-born storyteller and conversationalist. Part humor, part satire, part sarcasm, all of it in service of one thing: leaving a room more fired up, more curious, and more honest than I found it.
For more than 25 years — including my time as a Forbes writer with 1,500+ articles and 4,000+ conversations with CMOs, CEOs, and founders — I've been collecting the stories, patterns, and uncomfortable truths that leaders only share when the recorder is off. On stage, I put them to work. Audiences don't get a lecture. They get a conversation that happens to have a few hundred people in it — one that entertains first, because nobody ever got inspired while checking their email.
Every talk below can be customized to your audience, your industry, and your moment. Five people around a table or five hundred in a ballroom — the energy shows up either way. That part is non-negotiable.
Signature Talks
4,000 Conversations: What Leaders Told Me When the Recorder Was Off
Why human judgment is the one advantage AI cannot replicate — and how to sharpen yours.
Everyone has access to the same tools now. The same data, the same dashboards, the same AI assistants. So why do some leaders consistently see around corners while others get blindsided? After more than 4,000 conversations with CMOs, CEOs, and founders, Steve has an answer — and it has nothing to do with technology. In this talk, he distills a career's worth of off-the-record truths into a framework for judgment: how the best leaders separate signal from noise, when to trust the data and when to trust the room, and why the most valuable skill of the AI era is the one machines can't touch.
Curiosity Driven Marketing Is Your Best New Weapon to Beat the Competition
How staying strategically curious is the key to long-term success.
In an age where technologies and solutions change daily — and AI churns out sameness at scale — curiosity is what keeps marketers the proverbial one step ahead. But like everything else in life, there is a right way and a wrong way to use it. Drawing on his conversation with Oscar-winning filmmaker Brian Grazer (Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind), Steve shows teams how to practice what he calls "productive curiosity" — curiosity with a job to do — and turn it into a repeatable competitive advantage rather than a happy accident.
What You Think May Be Costing You Money
How your experience may be hurting you more than helping — and how to stop relying on it.
Too many marketers believe they know what's best for consumers based on prior actions or results. They are making highly critical, business-impacting decisions without the number one data point in mind: the customer. In this no-holds-barred talk, Steve calls out brands by name to show why no one's opinion should matter more than the customer's — including yours.
Overcoming Perceptions: The Hardest Battle You May Ever Be In
How changing the way people view you can affect your ability to lead.
Steve has lived this one. The perceptions his family and friends had of him were vastly different from his own — and for years, he set aside his own ambitions to live up to someone else's plan for his life. With the help of a few people who believed in him, he found the courage to ignore the skepticism and cynicism and chase his own path: from college dropout to former Forbes writer, one of the world's leading marketing authorities, and The CMO Whisperer. His story will help your audience push past the perceptions holding them back, wherever they are in life or career.
